Tim Wilson, the Director of Griefwalker interviewed Stephen Jenkinson about money at the time “Money and the Soul’s Desires” was first published, in a piece filmed for Vision TV.

(Tim) I want to talk about some of the deep difficulties that many people have with money. I recall a story you told me about the person you were training with as a therapist. You had a financial arrangement with him, and one week you decided on your own to put off payment for a short while. And he turned on you with quite a strong response…

(Steve) Yeah, he did. I thought it would just be O.K., and eventually he looked up at me in that kind of end-of-the-millennium tone he could invoke, and he said ‘Why me?’

I was so taken aback. And you see this is the naiveté we bring to these things. I thought we understood each other. I thought understanding would translate to the forgiveness of debt temporarily, and I thought that’s how he would translate his compassion and understanding for me. I mean his generosity of spirit was to make sure that I didn’t lose track of how awkward and difficult this moment was. But if you’re on the other end, you anticipate that generosity means you get off the hook gently.

So one of the things money does is keep you firmly impaled — unless we enter a conspiracy where neither one of us will talk about it. That’s how family life around money goes.

Nobody welcomes that kind of attention, because it’s unbecoming. All of us know that too much fascination with money is unbecoming. And then it has this kind of mysterious and filthy overtone, so we shouldn’t talk about it too much, because we become base by doing so.

Of course money isn’t filthy. Money isn’t anything, really. It’s as without identity as possible to be. It has no form, shape, or meaning in and of itself. Like Velcro it picks up everything you want to attribute to it. It can absorb infinitely all projections that everyone would make upon it, and that’s the genius of money. It’s not constrained in any way. It can be generosity one minute, betrayal the next, support one moment and domination and control the next ..

Money is conceivably potentially inexhaustible. There can always be more, there’s never enough. In that way psychologically it resembles what we call in this game the inexhaustible breast. The inexhaustible breast doesn’t mean it’s always there, which is one of the great cruelties of childhood that you cried and it wasn’t in your mouth immediately, but money has that way of working.

It can promise the world .. it doesn’t necessarily deliver. And in that promise everything inside us that yearns for what’s limitless, bounteous, the Garden of Eden in other words, comes forward, in spite of ourselves, in spite of our good judgment, and whatever we’ve acquired in the interim that tells us, ‘oh that not’s quite true,’ but you feel it anyhow ..

(Tim) What do you mean? What exactly comes forward in us?

(Steve) The longing to be cared for without measure, without limit, unconditionally. Like when I went into the supervisor’s office and I said ‘I’m sure you can let this one go.’ That was a gesture directly in that area. You’ll take care of me, and the sign will be, you’ll let me off with the money.

It’s welcome when it’s appropriate at a certain age, but when you become older and no one can take the place of the one who seemed to promise all, the bitterness over that seeming to be promised and not coming forward is enormous, monumental. Of course it happens most emphatically in families, and it happens in families most emphatically around these money questions, because money so clearly resembles that inexhaustible potential. If it’s inexhaustible, and I don’t have it, there’s cruelty in the universe, you see ..

(Tim) Well here’s a situation that many people our age are finding themselves in, to do with inheritances. When my father died, part of me felt I never got from him what in money terms what he might have owed me. And it was quite a tear, I was quite anxious about that. It brought up feelings of ‘I never got …’

(Steve) And probably the feeling that you should never have had that feeling..

(Tim) Exactly ..

(Steve) Here’s the thing, This is what happens in this room all the time. Something comes up like that, and the first thing is to wish that away, as if that’s undignified, unbecoming of your position as a son and the oldest, etc. Now he’s dead and you’re sticking the lance in, so to speak. See, the great service done to you by that inheritance was the opportunity to taste, very viscerally probably, your sense that he hadn’t done enough ..

Tim: Whether that’s true or not …

Yeah. And the answer is it’s true and not true. Of course it’s true he didn’t do enough .. But by what measure? By the measure of what you wanted and yearned for, and whatever his limitations as a person were, and however his generosity didn’t translate into your terms, and on and on. And money gave you that opportunity to see and feel all that, unwelcome though it may be. But what a wonderful thing ..

(Tim): Another thing that came up after going through ‘I didn’t get enough was ..’well, I didn’t earn this in any way’ .. and there was guilt around that, too …

(Steve): And now what? Whose money is this? What did I do for this? Oh yeah. There’s no safety, eh? No way to not feel these things. So of course the nature of my work is to invite people constantly into the feeling of it. And
And in this way I say that money gives you the opportunity to experience yourself authentically in spite of your inclination to the contrary …

(Tim) In spite of my inclination not to look at it, like you with your supervisor ..

(Steve) … Not to be authentic with yourself. And you see we damn money for this — at our own peril. I’m not saying to elevate it, I’m just saying, let it use you in this way, as you attempt to use it, because it’s very reciprocal. It’ll use you to get the truth out, money will. I know I’m talking about it as if it has its own mind, but it has a genius. Its emptiness is its genius. and it magnifies that which you are anyhow.

If you refuse to be tainted by money struggles, then you give up an opportunity to become spiritually enriched, disciplined, informed, and then you cut yourself as a potential example of being that way to others, see? Why? All because you’d like it to be simpler than it is. You’d like it to be cleaner than it is, and a lot less confounding than it is.

Money has the wonderful power to again attach you to the world, when the spiritual inclination of course is to lift off, and glide. And money says ‘No, you were born in this world, in this flesh, and I will nail you again to the wheel of this world, so that you leave nothing behind, and you can stand finally some way of contending.’ That’s all. You don’t have to win, you have to play. That’s what money says — “Play.”